Dan Hodges is a former Labour Party and GMB trade union official, and has managed numerous independent political campaigns. He writes about Labour with tribal loyalty and without reservation. You can read Dan's recent work here

Tony Blair isn't mad. But if he wants the West to intervene in Iraq, a period of silence on his part would be welcome

Boris Johnson is wrong. Tony Blair has not, as Boris observes in his characteristically forthright style, “gone mad”. It is true his “Essay” on the current carnage in Iraq makes numerous claims that are “jaw-droppingly and breathtakingly at variance with reality”. But it doesn’t follow all this represents a cry for “professional psychiatric help”.

Quite the opposite, in fact. Blair is acting in a coldly rational way. What is the sole job of former prime ministers? It is to convince the world that they are great former prime ministers.

Their livelihoods depend upon it. The lucrative lectures. The consultancies. The book deals. All require their subjects to speak from a position of wisdom and contemporary historical strength. Otherwise why bother to attend the lecture, pay for their counsel or by their book in the first place?

This doesn’t mean – as Blair’s numerous critics assert – that he is being mercenary with his interventions. It’s just what he does now. Being an ex-prime minister is his job.

Iraq is essentially the Moby Dick to Tony Blair’s Captain Ahab. "Moby Dick seeks thee not. It is thou, thou, that madly seekest him!" Starbuck informs his doomed captain. But Ahab isn’t mad. He knows until he spears his prey he will never be free.

And it’s the same with Blair. He knows that unless he can convince people he was right all along, then his political legacy will forever be scarred by the flames and smeared by the blood of his catastrophic middle east mis-adventure.

He won’t convince anyone, of course. And deep down he knows it. But it’s that knowledge, bizarrely, that drives him on. The deeper the whale dives, the more desperate he becomes.

But while Tony Blair hasn’t gone mad, his crew have. Over the weekend the small but loyal band of Blairite commentators and supporters have once again been rallying to his side. They were out in force on twitter yesterday, pushing the lines espoused in his Iraq essay. Their argument is basically threefold. Iraq wasn’t a mistake. Even if certain aspects of the invasion and its aftermath were mishandled, that wasn’t Tony Blair’s fault. And even if it was Tony Blair’s fault, people should just forget about it and worry about what’s happening in Iraq now, not what happened in 2003.

Well, good luck with that. Firstly, Iraq was a moral, humanitarian and geo-political catastrophe. You will be hard pushed to find a single respected foreign affairs analyst who argues otherwise. And by trying to argue the opposite, supporters of Tony Blair are merely displaying the same level of ideological fanaticism as their opponents.

Second, it was Tony Blair’s war just as much as it was George Bush’s war. The line being put about by Blair’s aides in the run up to the invasion – that their man was merely sticking close to Bush so he could guide him down the UN path – was a lie. Blair was peddling that fiction so he could guide his party and his country down whichever path Bush chose. There were people in the Cabinet discreetly trying to prevent a rush to war, but the prime minister wasn’t one of them.

Third, Tony Blair’s supporters can make as many pleas to “focus on the now” as they like. People won’t. Indeed, it is hard to find a more vivid example of the way in which Iraq scrambles the heads of Tony Blair’s advocates than their argument that we should all read Blair’s essay, weigh his words free of preconceptions, then act upon them.

The cornerstone of Blairism was pragmatism. Looking at the world as it actually is, not how we dearly wish it would be. Well this is how the world is. If Tony Blair genuinely wants us to intervene in Iraq or Syria he needs to stop penning essays about how we need to intervene in Iraq and Syria.

It isn’t that people aren’t listening to him. They’re listening all right. And when they hear Tony Blair say “we should do X” on foreign policy they say “Right. If that’s what Blair thinks, we should do Y”.

Public opinion cannot be “turned” on Iraq. Tony Blair will not be “exonerated”. Nor will people simply “forget and move on”. Not so long as Blair himself keeps insisting he was right on Iraq, and everyone else was wrong. And if his supporters genuinely can’t see that, then they really have lost there grip on reason.

The problem in Iraq is that both Blair’s supporters and Blair’s opponents are wrong. Of course the current carnage has its roots in the 2003 invasion. “There is also no doubt that a major proximate cause of the takeover of Mosul by ISIS is the situation in Syria,” Blair writes. Yes. And why has the world sat on its hands over Syria? Because after Iraq it’s proved impossible to construct a consensus behind intervention in Syria.

“We need a comprehensive plan for the Middle East that correctly learns the lessons of the past decade,” Blair says. A lesson that has at its starting point that the second Iraq war just and right?

“The inadequacy of the Iraqi forces have led to the alienation of the Sunni community,” he claims. Correct. And who was it who ordered those Iraqi forces be bombed back to the stone age?

This is the truth about the current situation in Iraq. Yes, we are to blame for that country imploding before our eyes. And that’s precisely why we have a responsibility to intervene, rather than turn out back.

“Look at what a disaster our intervention was last time,” the opponents of action claim. And they’re right. But while we may not be good at nation-building, we do know how to deal with large groups of militiamen cruising serenely across the open desert in their 4×4’s. However well funded and trained ISIS are, they’re not as well trained and funded as the US Air Force.

This isn’t about Tony Blair. Actually, it is. It’s about doing whatever we can, however imperfect, to try and right Tony Blair’s wrong. Yes, we may fail. But we have a duty to try.

Tony Blair isn’t mad. And that’s why he and his supporters need to realise the only thing we need from him on Iraq is silence.